InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 27, 1999
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When potential customers who visit its Web site look for information, NorthPoint uses a custom-built application to prequalify the prospects by factors such as whether NorthPoint offers DSL in that company's region. MarketFirst determines which ISP is the appropriate partner to handle the request and passes on the lead, then tracks whether a partner has followed up. The system helps ensure that ISPs get high-quality leads and that customer needs are met. "MarketFirst is the system that matches our two sets of customers," Levine says. As ISPs report on success with customers, NorthPoint also gains insight for future marketing campaigns.
For other companies, the relationship between business and IT is institutionalized. At Phoenix health-care company Catholic Healthcare West's Shared Business Services, each IT person responsible for a technology has a business counterpart. The two work together on all issues relating to the center. That means IT is responsible for customer service, with key personnel wearing pagers to respond quickly to customer calls.
AXA's IT group is putting its new understanding to the test with an initiative that will give it a clearer picture of customers. Instead of adopting a CRM package, AXA is leaving data in its legacy systems and tapping enterprise application integration software to interconnect those systems. In the past, AXA's life-insurance policy administration group stored customer information in separate mainframes by policy. But most customers had multiple policies with the company. When agents wanted to pull up customer information, they had to access multiple systems.
The solution came in the form of Candle Corp.'s Roma application integration software, which extracts and normalizes data from the legacy systems. Roma will integrate four major systems, linking them to one user interface on an agent's desktop. The software will be used to link to three other systems in AXA's annuity business. As a result, agents will have to query only one system, one time, to find customer data.
Another project, dubbed CRM, will give AXA a companywide view of customer activities. Despite the name, CRM won't be an application suite from a customer-relationship management vendor but will integrate multiple systems. It will contain customer demographics, financial information, and interaction history across all of its business units. So if the customer has accounts in AXA's annuities, brokerage, and capital-management units, a representative would know how much money a customer is spending with the company, not just a single business unit.
Centralized Infrastructure
But the line-of-business units, with their own IT staffs, control everything that directly affects their businesses. "It's really galvanized the lines of business to evaluate their priorities," says Gregory Moran, VP of IT strategy. That meant faster response to customer needs. The retail banking group was able to more rapidly build an intranet portal that pulled together information from multiple customer information systems. While the group was planning such a portal, users let the IT group know it was important, and IT got to it right away because it didn't have to worry about higher-priority projects.
Not every business will take such dramatic measures to bring IT into contact with the customer. But regardless of how they get there, it's becoming increasingly clear that when the customer is the king, IT needs to be a dependable servant.
NorthPoint connects with its customers primarily through a network of Internet service providers--which it also considers to be customers. But the indirect sales channel, with its layer of intermediaries, makes it difficult for NorthPoint to understand business customer needs correctly and quickly. To remedy that, NorthPoint has adopted marketing automation software from MarketFirst Inc. to help the company pass leads to sales partners, as well as gather information about customers the partners are serving.
AXA Financial has put in place formal and informal programs to help IT and business units work together to handle customer concerns. A weeklong retreat for all the company's senior executives helped each group determine what it could bring to the CRM initiative. Beyond the gathering, IT and business sit in on each other's staff meetings. Buskard is part of the customer-service staff meeting, helping the senior VP of IT understand customer problems and bring his technological knowledge to bear.
Radical surgery is sometimes required to move IT closer to customers and the business units. Bank One Inc., the nation's fifth-largest bank-holding company, had a traditional centralized IT infrastructure and the liabilities that come with it--nonresponsiveness to customer and business needs. So the Chicago bank tore its IT organization apart, moving responsibility for customer-facing applications to the lines of business, which would be managed by a local chief technology officer reporting to the bank's CIO and the head of the business unit.
Bank One now has a hybrid structure. All of its infrastructure, including networking, telecom, data centers, servers, and desktop systems, is handled by a central IT group. The company formed a partnership, called Alliance 1, with AT&T and IBM that lets the bank pay for technology as it's used. IBM hosts all data center functions in megadata centers called geoplexes. Another central unit handles all enterprisewide applications for Bank One.
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Illustration by Dennis Harms
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